“A new study has found that people in Ontario who struggle to afford food cost the health-care system more – in some cases more than twice as much – than those who don’t, prompting one researcher to call for a guaranteed annual income to address the ‘crisis.’

“We need to be more deliberate at focusing resources at people on the bottom end of the spectrum,” said Dr. Valerie Tarasuk of the University of Toronto’s Department of Nutritional Sciences.

Dr. Tarasuk, along with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, looked at data from more than 67,000 adults in the province to determine whether an association exists between income-related barriers to food and annual health-care costs.”